The Wild

With only 83 individuals and five breeding pairs in the wild, Mexican gray wolves remain at serious risk of extinction. Recovery planning and implementation, legally required under the Endangered Species Act, are necessary to ensure the lobos’ survival.

Last year in Rhode Island, then-12-year-old Alyssa Grayson approached Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell at an event and boldly handed her a letter asking her to reconsider plans to delist wolves from the Endangered Species Act.

The Wilderness Act, signed into law 50 years ago in September of 1964, set aside millions of acres as wilderness, describing wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Nearing the anniversary of the Act, one traveler seeks a gray wolf deep in Oregon’s wilds and finds the most endangered wolf of all: within us.

A federal judge has blocked a plan to carve new roads into a 36,700-acre block of secure grizzly bear habitat within the Stillwater State Forest in northwest Montana. The judge’s ruling, issued late Thursday, preserves the “Stillwater Core” grizzly bear habitat from elimination under a plan by the State of Montana that called for building new roads to open the area to increased logging.